This is the story of a terrible tragedy that comes to an end: that of the disappearance of a young child from Puerto Rico, Luis Armando Albino, kidnapped in 1951 in a park in West Oakland, California, in the United States. More than seventy years later, he has just been found… alive.
On February 21, 1951, this young child, then barely 6 years old, was playing with his brother in a park when a stranger lured him by promising him candy, rapporte The Guardian. Once out of sight, the woman kidnapped him and everyone lost track of him. Even a massive search operation by the army and police could not find him: Luis had disappeared.
For decades, the boy’s family tried in vain to find his whereabouts. His mother, who died in 2005, will not have had the joy of learning that he has finally been found, thanks to her niece and an improbable circumstance.
New York, Vietnam and reunions
It all started with a DNA test conducted in 2020 by Alida Alequin, Luis’ niece. Just for fun, she posted her results online on a website and discovered, by chance, a strange match with an individual. Nearly 22% of their DNA matched! Enough to revive the case, even decades later.
Investigators reopened the 1951 disappearance case with the help of the FBI and went to the home of this individual whose DNA strangely matched. A new sample was compared to that of the mother of Alida, Luis’ sister. The result was clear: it was indeed Luis!
The whole family was reunited, seventy years later. The least we can say is that they had things to tell each other. After his kidnapping, Luis was taken to the East Coast of the United States, where he was raised by a couple. As an adult, he served in Vietnam with the Marines, then became a firefighter. Now a grandfather, he was able to reunite with his brother Roger, who was there the day he was kidnapped. The latter had the pleasure of seeing Luis one last time before passing away a few weeks later.
Source: www.slate.fr
